A Faith Illustration
by Norman Grubb

What shall I do about this mountain, this hopeless situation, this impos-sible person?

Well, I had learned the first step from Rees Howells. Not calling on God and asking Him for deliverance; nor listening to man-but listening to God. In other words, not what we think about it, but what has He to say to us about it. "What’s up, God?" reverses prayer. It is not we talking to Him and bringing Him our needs, but giving Him the chance to talk to us.

For us at that time it certainly was the difference between collapse and continuing. We listened. But how does God talk to us, or we hear His voice? We have already gone into that: by knowing our inner spirit-union, then catching on to what comes to our minds as what He is saying to us. On that occasion, a thought came to us fully suitable to our special calling. We remembered that our founder, when he first went alone as a pioneer to the heart of Africa, wrote that God had spoken to him on board ship "in strange fashion" and said to him, "This journey is not only for the heart of Africa but for the whole unevangelized world." He had added, when he wrote this home to his wife, "To human reason it sounds ridiculous, but faith laughs as impossibilities and cries, ‘It shall be done!"

Well, that was certainly absurd to us. Our thirty-five in the Congo were almost at starving level, and here God was coming back to us through our founder and saying, "Not only for the heart of Africa but for the whole unevangelized world." But we knew it was the word of the Lord in all his impossibility, and we accepted it. For C.T. Studd had said specifically: "Faith laughs at impossibilities," and this was where he and Rees Howells talked the same language-faith!